There are many different accents and dialects throughout England
and people are often very proud of their local accent or dialect,
but there are many associated prejudices— illustrated by George
Bernard Shaw's comment:

It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth
without making some other Englishman hate or despise him.[1]

Other terms used to refer to the English language as spoken in
England include: English
English, [2][3]Anglo-English, [4][5]English in England. [6] The
related term British English has "all the
ambiguities and tensions in the word "British" and as a result can
be used and interpreted in two ways, more broadly or more narrowly,
within a range of blurring and ambiguity"[7] but is
usually reserved to describe the features common to English
English, Welsh
English, Scottish English, and Hiberno-English.

The accent best known to many people
outside the United Kingdom as English English, is that of Received Pronunciation (RP).
Until recently, RP English was widely believed to be more educated
than other accents and was referred to as the Queen's (or King's)
English, or even "BBC English" (because for many years of
broadcasting it was rare to hear any other dialect on the BBC). But
for several decades now regional accents have been more widely
accepted and are frequently heard. RP is also sometimes called
"Oxford English", and the Oxford Dictionary
gives RP pronunciations for each word.

Native English speakers can often tell quite accurately where a
person comes from, frequently down to within a few miles.
Historically, such differences could be a major impediment to
understanding between people from different areas. There are also
many cases where a large city has a very different accent from the
rural area around it (e.g. Bristol and Avon, Hull and the East
Riding, Liverpool and Lancashire). But modern communications and
mass media have reduced these differences in some parts of the
country.[8][9]
Speakers may also change their pronunciation and vocabulary,
particularly towards Received Pronunciation and Standard
English when in public.

British Isles varieties of English, including English English,
are discussed in John C. Wells (1982). Some of the
features of English English are that:

As noted above, Northern versions of the dialect lack the foot-strut split, so that there is no
distinction between /ʊ/ and /ʌ/, making put and putt
homophones as /pʊt/.

In the Southern varieties, words like bath,
cast, dance, fast, after,
castle, grass etc. are pronounced with the long
vowel found in calm (that is, [ɑː] or a similar vowel) while in the Midlands
and Northern varieties they are pronounced with the same vowel as
trap or cat, usually [a]. For more details see Trap-bath
split. There are some areas of the West Country that would use
the Southern variety for some words and the Northern variety for
other words.

Many varieties undergo h-dropping,
making harm and arm homophones. This is a feature
of working-class accents across most of England, but was
traditionally stigmatised (a fact the comedy musical My Fair Lady was
quick to exploit) but less so now.[11] This
was geographically widespread, but the linguist A.C. Gibson stated
that it did not extend to the far north, nor to East Anglia, Essex,
Wiltshire or Somerset.[12] In
the past, working-class people were often unsure where an
h ought to be pronounced, and, when attempting to speak
"properly", would often preface any word that began with a vowel
with an h (e.g. "henormous" instead of enormous,
"hicicles" instead of icicles); this was referred to as
the "hypercorrect h" in the Survey of English Dialects,
and is also referenced in literature (e.g. the policeman in Danny
the Champion of the World).

A glottal stop
for intervocalic /t/ is now common amongst younger speakers
across the country; it was originally confined to some areas of the
south-east and East Anglia.

Most varieties have the horse-hoarse
merger. However some northern accents retain the distinction,
pronouncing pairs of words like for/four,
horse/hoarse and
morning/mourning differently.[13]

The consonant clusters /sj/, /zj/, and /lj/ in suit, Zeus, and
lute are preserved by some.

Many Southern varieties have the bad-lad split,
so that bad/bæːd/ and lad/læd/ do not rhyme.

In most of the eastern half of England, plurals and past
participle endings which are pronounced /ɪz/ and /ɪd/ (with the vowel of kit) in RP may
be pronounced with a schwa/ə/. This can be found as far north as Wakefield and as far south
as Essex. This is unusual in
being an east-west division in pronunciation when English dialects
generally divide between north and south. Another east-west
division involves the rhotic [r]; it can be heard in the speech of
country folk (particularly the elder), more or less west of the
course of the Roman era road known as Watling Street (the modern A5), which at
one time divided King Alfred's Wessex from Mercia and Northumbria.
The rhotic [r] is rarely found in the east.

Sporadically, miscellaneous items of generally obsolete
vocabulary survive: come in the past tense rather than
came; the use of thou and/or ye for
you.

Change over
time

There has been academic interest in dialects since the late 19th
century. The main works are On Early English Pronunciation
by A.J. Ellis, English Dialect
Grammar by Joseph Wright, and the English Dialect
Dictionary also by Joseph Wright. The Dialect Test was
developed by Joseph Wright so he could hear the differences of the
vowel sounds of a dialect by listening to different people reading
the same short passage of text.

In the 1950s and 1960s the Survey of English Dialects
was undertaken to preserve a record of the traditional spectrum of
rural dialects that merged into each other. The traditional picture
was that there would be a few changes in lexicon and pronunciation
every couple of miles, but that there would be no sharp borders
between completely different ways of speaking. Within a county, the
accents of the different towns and villages would drift gradually
so that residents of bordering areas sounded more similar to those
in neighbouring counties.

But because of greater social mobility and the teaching of
"Standard English" in secondary
schools, this model is no longer very accurate. There are some
English counties in which there is little change in accent/dialect, and people are more likely to
categorise their accent by a region or county than by their town or
village. As agriculture became less prominent, many
rural dialects were lost. Some urban dialects have also declined; for
example, traditional Bradford dialect is now quite rare in the
city, and call centres have seen Bradford as a useful location for
the very fact there is a lack of dialect in potential
employees.[14][15]
Some call centres state that they were attracted to Bradford
because it has a regional accent which is relatively easy to
understand.[16]

But working in the opposite direction concentrations of
migration may cause a town or area to have a completely unique
accent. The two most famous examples are Liverpool and Corby. Liverpool's dialect is influenced heavily
by Irish and Welsh, and it sounds completely different from
surrounding areas of Lancashire. Corby's dialect is influenced
heavily by Scots, and it sounds completely
different from the rest of Northamptonshire. The Voices 2006
survey found that the various ethnic minorities that have settled
in large populations in parts of Britain develop their own specific
dialects. For example, many residents of East London, even if they are not from Bangladesh, may have a
Bangladeshi influence on their accent. So sometimes urban dialects
may now be just as easily identifiable as rural dialects. In the
traditional view, urbawere speech was just seen as a watered-down
version of the surrounding rural area. Historically, rural areas
had much more stable demographics than urban areas, but there is
now only a small difference. It has probably never been true since
the Industrial Revolution caused an
enormous influx to cities from rural areas.

Southern
England

In general, Southern English accents are distinguished from
Northern English accents primarily by not using the short a in
words such as "bath". In the south-east, the broad A is normally used
before a /f/, /s/ or /θ/: words such as "cast" and "bath" are
pronounced /kɑːst/, /bɑːθ/ rather than /kæst/, /bæθ/. This sometimes occurs before
/nd/: it is used in "command"
and "demand" but not in "brand"
or "grand".

In the south-west, an /aː/ sound in used in these words but also in
words that take /æ/ in RP; there is no trap-bath split but both are pronounced
with an extended fronted vowel.[17]
Bristol is an exception to the bath-broadening rule: it uses /a/ in the trap and bath sets, just as is the
case in the North and the Midlands.[18]

Relatively recently, the first two have increasingly influenced
southern accents outside London via social class mobility and the expansion of
London. From some time during
the 19th century, middle and upper-middle classes began to adopt
affectations, including the RP accent, associated with the upper
class. In the late 20th and 21st century other social changes, such
as middle-class RP-speakers forming an increasing component of
rural communities, have accentuated the spread of RP. The
south-east coast accents traditionally have several features in
common with the West country; for example, rhoticity and the a:
sound in words such as bath, cast, etc. However,
the younger generation in the area is more likely to be non-rhotic
and use the London/East Anglian A: sound in bath.

After the Second
World War, about one million Londoners were relocated to new and
expanded towns throughout the south east, bringing with them their
distinctive London accent (and possibly sowing the seed of Estuary
English).

In the nearby counties of Berkshire, Hampshire and the Isle of Wight, it was possible to
encounter comparable accents and, indeed, distinct local dialects
until perhaps the 1960s. There is now limited use of such dialects
amongst older people in local areas. Although natives of such
locations, especially in western parts, can still have West Country
influences in their speech, the increased mobility and urbanisation of the population have meant
that local Berkshire, Hampshire and Isle of Wight dialects (as
opposed to accents) are today essentially extinct.

Academically the regional variations are considered to be
dialectal forms. The Survey of English
Dialects captured manners of speech across the West
Country that were just as different from Standard English as
anything from the far North. Close proximity has completely
different languages such as Cornish, which is a Celtic
language related to Welsh, and more closely to Breton.

East
Anglia

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Norfolk

The Norfolk
dialect is spoken in the traditional county of Norfolk and
areas of north Suffolk. Famous speakers include Lord
Nelson and Keith
Skipper. The group FOND (Friends Of Norfolk Dialect) was formed
to record the county's dialect and to provide advice for TV
companies using the dialect in productions.

It is also spoken on the borders with Cambridgeshire. There, it
is characterized by being very softly spoken, all vowels and
consonants pronounced, extremely long vowels and rhotic R's.

Midlands

As in the North, Midlands accents generally do not use a broad A, so
that cast is pronounced [kast] rather than the [kɑːst] pronunciation of most southern accents.
The northern limit of the [ɑː] in many words crosses England from mid-Shropshire to The Wash, passing just south
of Birmingham.

Midlands speech also generally uses the northern short U, so
putt is pronounced the same as put. The southern
limit of this pronunciation also crosses from mid-Shropshire to the
Wash, but dipping further south to the northern part of Oxfordshire.

The West Midlands accent is often described as having a
pronounced nasal quality, the East Midlands accent much less
so.

Old and cold may be pronounced as "owd" and
"cowd" (rhyming with "loud" in the West Midlands and "ode" in the
East Midlands), and in the northern Midlands home can
become "wom".

Whether Derbyshire should be classed as the West or East
Midlands in terms of dialect is debatable. Stanley Ellis, a dialect expert, said in
1985 that it was more like the West Midlands, but it is often
grouped with the East and is part of the regionEast Midlands.

Cheshire, although
part of the North-West region, is usually grouped the Midlands for
the purpose of accent and dialect.

West
Midlands

Dialect verbs are used, for example am for
are, ay for is not (related to
ain't), bay for are not, bin
for am or, emphatically, for are. Hence the
following joke dialogue about bay windows: "What sort of windas am
them?" "They'm bay windas." "Well if they bay windas wot bin
them?". There is also humour to be derived from the shop-owner's
sign of Mr. "E. A. Wright" (that is, "He ay [isn't] right," a
phrase implying someone is saft [soft] in the jed
[head]). Saft also may mean silly as in, "Stop bein' so
saft".

The Birmingham and Coventry accents are quite distinct, even
though the cities are only 19 miles/30 km apart.

The g sound may be emphatically pronounced where it
occurs in the combination ng, in words such as
ringing and fang.

Around Stoke-on-Trent, the short i can
sound rather like a short e, so milk and
biscuit become something like "melk" and "bess-kit".
Strong 'Potteries' accents can even render the latter as
"bess-keet". The Potteries accent is perhaps the most distinctly
'northern' of the West Midlands accents, given that the urban area
around Stoke-on-Trent is close to the Cheshire border.

East
Midlands

Yod-dropping, as in East Anglia, can be
found in some areas, for example new as /nuː/, sounding like "noo".

The u vowel of words like strut is often
[ʊ], with no distinction between putt
and put. In Lincolnshire, such sounds are even shorter
than in the North.

In Leicester, words
with short vowels such as up and last have a
northern pronunciation, whereas words with vowels such as
down and road sound rather more like a
south-eastern accent. The vowel sound at the end of words like
border (and the name of the city) is also a distinctive
feature. [2]

In north Nottinghamshireee found in
short words is pronounced as two syllables, for example
feet being [ˈfijəʔ], sounding like "fee-yut" (and also in
this case ending with a glottal stop).

Lincolnshire
also has a marked north-south split in terms of accent. The north
shares many features with Yorkshire, such as the open a
sound in "car" and "park" or the replacement of take and
make with tek and mek. The south of
Lincolnshire is close to Received Pronunciation, although it still
has a short Northern a in words such as bath.

Mixing of the words was and were when the
other is used in Standard English.

The town of Corby in
northern Northamptonshire has an accent with
some originally Scottish features, apparently due to immigration of
Scottish steelworkers. [3] It is common in
Corby for the GOAT set of words to be pronounced with /oː/. This pronunciation is used across Scotland
and most of Northern England, but Corby is alone in the Midlands in
using it.[19]

South-East
Midlands

The traditional dialects of Bedfordshire, Huntingdonshire and south
Northamptonshire are closer to Received Pronunciation than any
other dialects in Britain. This is because the upper-class who
migrated into London during the 15th century were mostly from the
counties just north of London. However, there are still a number of
differences between their dialects and R.P.:

This area traditionally used /aː/ in words where an was followed by /f/, /s/ or /θ/. Younger speakers in the area are more
likely to use the R.P. /ɑː/.[20]

The isogloss for the vowel in cup, strut, such, etc.
is another traditional north-south marker, but the isogloss is
slightly further south for this. Much of the area uses /ʊ/. Some parts of this area, such as Peterborough, would
use the southern pronunciation for "bath" but the northern
pronunciation for "suck".[21]

The TRAP vowel (corresponding to RP /æ/) is realised as [a], as is the case in all of England except the
south-east and East Anglia.[22]

In common with the south-east, the vowel in about, pound,
sound, etc may be [ɛʊ] rather than /aʊ/.[23]

It is common for residents of this area to pronounce the -shire
in county names as /ʃɪə/ rather than the more common /ʃə/, which is used in the Oxford
Dictionary.[24]

In some areas, an /ai/ can turn into an [oi] sound. For
example, nineteen ninety-five would be said as
noineteen noientee foive.

Northern
England

There are several accent features which are common to most of
the accents of northern England (Wells 1982, section 4.4).

The "short a" vowel of cat, trap is normally
pronounced [a] rather than the [æ] found in traditional Received Pronunciation
and in many forms of American English.

The accents of Northern England generally do not use a /ɑː/. so cast is pronounced [kast] rather than the [kɑːst] pronunciation of most southern
accents.

In some cases, the RP /ɑː/ instead becomes /aː/: for example, in the words palm, cart,
start, tomato.

Northern English tends not to have /ʌ/ (strut, but, etc.) as a
separate vowel. Most words that have this vowel in RP are
pronounced with /ʊ/ in Northern accents, so that put
and putt are homophonous as /pʊt/. But some words with /ʊ/ in RP can have /uː/ in the more conservative Northern accents,
so that a pair like luck and look may be
distinguished as /lʊk/ and /luːk/.

In most areas, the letter y on the end of words as in
happy or city is pronounced [ɪ], like the i in bit, and
not [i]. This was considered RP until the 1990s. The
longer [i] is found in the far north and in the
Merseyside area.

The vowel in dress, test, pet, etc. is slightly more
open, transcribed by Wells as /ɛ/ rather than /e/.

The Received Pronunciation phonemes /eɪ/ (as in face) and /əʊ/ (as in goat) are often pronounced
as monophthongs (such as [eː] and [oː]). However, the quality of these vowels
varies considerably across the region, and this is considered a
greater indicator of a speaker's social class than the less
stigmatised aspects listed above.

Some dialect words used across the North are listed in extended
editions of the Oxford Dictionary with a marker "North England":
for example, the words ginnell and snicket for
specific types of alleyway, the word fettle for to
organise, or the use of while to mean until. The
best-known Northern words are nowt, owt and
summat, which are included in most dictionaries. For more
localised features, see the following sections.

The "present historical" is named
after the speech of the region, but it is often used in many
working class dialects in the south of England too. Instead of
saying "I said to him", users of the rule would say, "I
says to him". Instead of saying, "I went up
there", they would say, "I goes up there.

In the far north of England, the local speech is
indistinguishable from Scots. Wells said that northernmost
Northumberland "though politically English is linguistically
Scottish".[25]

Liverpool
(Scouse)

Yorkshire

Wuthering Heights is one of the
few classic works of English literature to contain a substantial
amount of dialect. Set in Haworth, the servant Joseph speaks in the
traditional dialect of the area, which many modern readers struggle
to understand. This dialect was still spoken around Haworth until
the late 1970s, but there is now only a minority of it still in
everyday use.[26]

Middlesbrough
area

The accents for Middlesbrough and the surrounding towns are
sometimes grouped with Yorkshire and sometimes grouped with the
North-East of England, for they share characteristics with both. As
this urban area grew in the early 20th century, there are fewer
dialect words that date back to older forms of English; Teesside
speak is the sort of modern dialect that Peter Trudgill identified
in his "The Dialects of England". There is a Lower Tees Dialect
group[27]
A recent study found that most people from Middlesbrough do not
consider their accent to be "Yorkshire", but that they are less
hostile to being grouped with Yorkshire than to being grouped with
the Geordie accent.[28]
Some examples of traits that are shared with [most parts of]
Yorkshire include:

H-dropping.

An /aː/ sound in words such as start, car,
park, etc.

In common with the east coast of Yorkshire, words such as
bird, first, nurse, etc. have an /E:/ sound. It is
difficult to represent this using the alphabet, but could be
written bare-d, fare-st, nare-ss. [This vowel sound also
occurs in Liverpool and Birkenhead].

Lancashire

Cumbria

North-East
England

Dialects in this region are often known as Mackem or Geordie. The dialects across the region are
broadly similar however some differences do exist. For example,
with words ending -re/-er, such as culture and father, the end
syllable is pronounced by a Newcastle native as a short 'a', such
as in 'fat' and 'back' therefore producing "cultcha" and "fatha"
respectively. The Sunderland area would pronounce the syllable much
more closely to that of other accents. Similarly, Geordies
pronounce "make" in line with standard English e.g. to rhyme with
take. However, a Mackem would pronounce "make" to rhyme with "mack"
or "tack" (hence the origin of the term Mackem). For other
differences see the respective articles. For an explanation of the
traditional dialects of the mining areas of County Durham and
Northumberland see Pitmatic.

A feature of the North East accent, shared with Scots and Irish
English, is the pronunciation of the consonant cluster -lm in coda
position. As an example, "film" is pronounced as "filəm".

Barnsley: in the 1969
film Kes, the
lead characters, David Bradley and Freddie Fletcher,
both have very broad Barnsley accents, which are less likely to be
heard nowadays. Sam Nixon from Pop Idol 2003, Top Of The Pops
Saturday and Reloaded and Level Up also has a Barnsley accent.
Also, chat show host Michael Parkinson and ex-union leader
Arthur
Scargill have slightly reduced Barnsley accents.

Radio and TV
featuring regional English accents

Misrepresentations can also appear in the media. The soap Emmerdale is set in
Yorkshire, yet some of the actors have Lancashire accents. Coronation
Street is set in Lancashire, yet some of the actors speak
with Yorkshire accents.

The
Archers has had characters with a variety of different
West Country accents (see Mummerset). Also, CBBC show Byker Grove is set in Byker, Newcastle whereas the actors in recent
series often have Sunderland accents.

Channel 4's reality programme Rock School was set in Suffolk in its
second series, providing lots of examples of the Suffolk
dialect.

The television character, Stewie Griffin, from the popular
animated TV series Family Guy is well known for his
English accent in the US, despite not sounding authentic to most
English people. His voice actor Seth MacFarlane, also creator of the TV
series, is American. Dick Van Dyke had similar success with
his Cockney accent in the Disney film Mary Poppins. However, this accent is
highly inaccurate as Van Dyke made the erroneous decision that the
best place for him to learn a Cockney accent was in Australia.

^Liverpool Journal; Baffling
Scouse Is Spoken Here, So Bring a Sensa YumaInternational Herald
Tribune, 15 March 2005. "While most regional accents in England
are growing a touch less pronounced in this age of high-speed
travel and 600-channel satellite systems, it seems that the
Liverpool accent is boldly growing thicker. ... migrating London
accents are blamed for the slight changes in regional accents over
the past few decades. ... That said, the curator of English accents
and dialects at the British Library said the Northeast accents,
from places like Northumberland and Tyneside, were also going
stronger."